From the wreckage of the past he might have salvaged a favourite toy, a book. But these he relinquished with never a pang, pressing them on friends or neighbourhood urchins, munificent as a maharajah. He watched old exercise books curl and blacken in the mali ’s bonfire with glee. The little album with its dinted spine remained his only souvenir of India. No one knew it was in his possession; or so Tom believed. In fact Karen, for one, had pondered the anomaly it represented with some curiosity.
From time to time Tom flicked through the album. Signatures made him pause. Childhood mythologies uncoiled from certain names; others sank back into the faceless, unimaginable swarm of those who had known his mother when she was young. Be good, sweet maid, and let who will / Be clever. So Sebastian de Souza’s exquisite copperplate enjoined his daughter.
With time and rereading, Tom had the autograph album’s contents by heart. He didn’t wish to retain vows of undying friendship, mildly salacious witticisms, exhortations to virtue and remembrance; but the album had taken possession of him. He could never be rid of it now.
Details of Nelly’s pictures would blend with Tom’s dreams, spawning brilliant figments lost to ham-fisted day. When he woke his eyes looked wider in the mirror, sated with images.
There was a nebulous quality to him in these months. Women were susceptible to it. In strange bedrooms he profi ted from their interest. He was ghostly; his rapture precise, embodied.
He speculated about the transformation of Nelly’s work after Atwood disappeared. The change to showing photographs of her paintings, too radical for evolution, suggested extremity. Tom was inclined to read it as a fable of loss: Atwood as categorically absent and mourned as the paintings Nelly destroyed. Photography was a form of willed remembrance. Tom was wary of it: this spectral medium, tirelessly calling up the past. Sometimes he shrank from a spread of Nelly’s photos as from a collection of gravestones, each a loving memorial to her marriage.
He brought up the topic with Brendon. Who said, ‘I’ve always figured showing photos is Nelly’s way of paying tribute to painting. To that whole inheritance that’s been nudged aside by new ways of thinking about art. I’d say it’s about photography as a memory of painting.’
Nevertheless, Tom divined the play of the erotic in Nelly’s choice of medium. In its early years, photography had caused trepidation. The little likenesses it fabricated were so uncannily exact, it was feared they would drain vitality from their subjects; a vestige of the older, Romantic dread of the double who was believed to destroy a man’s true self.
The suspicion lingered, in attenuated form, well into the twentieth century. But it was symptomatic of an era in which photographs were few, the power of the copy deriving from its relative rarity. By contrast, the postmodern plethora of images struck Tom as enhancing the particularity of an original. An array of photographs standing in for a subject only accentuated what wasn’t there. Desire swelled for the absent fl esh, the real elsewhere. In substituting a photograph for a painting, Nelly raised the temperature of interest in her work. There was shrewdness in her method, decided Tom. Her photos tantalised with the promise of something more that was always deferred.
The painted landscape he had first seen in Posner’s gallery possessed a quality entirely absent from what followed. Trying to identify it, Tom thought of innocence. Then, as his mind played about the little oblong, he realised that its aura was also a lack. It was an image that knew nothing of time.
As the year lengthened, a development escaped Tom’s attention. His copious stream of notes was dwindling; growing costive. On a night in October, an hour spent with Nelly’s work produced only this spiteful trace: Photography is a result of the desire to freeze time. A photograph is always a record of a failure.
One evening, Nelly and he watched an old video of The Innocents; which was, they agreed, not nearly as disturbing as The Turn of the Screw. Afterwards, as Tom walked her back to the Preserve, Nelly kept returning to the standard, unsolvable enigma of James’s ghosts. ‘I mean, you’re shown them in the film. When what’s so creepy in the book is you can’t tell if they’re there or just something the governess imagines.’
The dog was with them that night, clicking along the pavement. From feathery plots of wild fennel by the railway line, he emerged odorous with aniseed. He cocked his leg at every opportunity, writing his chronicles in urine. He was drawn by unmown grass and the pellety excrement of possums. Ramshackle paperbarks detained him for minutes with their aromatic folds. He was attuned to an invisible world; to the redolent leavings of bodies that had once populated these spaces.
Nelly said, ‘This is going to sound a little crazy.’
‘Yeah?’
‘About five years ago I was on this tram, and I felt someone watching me.’ It was delivered in Nelly’s usual sporadic style: talk as faulty machinery. ‘You know that feeling between your shoulderblades?’
On the opposite side of the unlit street a block of fl ats rose over a pillared car park. Something pale was astir in its darkness. Tom looked away.
‘The tram was packed, and I couldn’t see anyone I knew, and everyone was just doing that staring into space thing. But I was sure Felix was there.’ Nelly said, ‘I knew he was watching me. It went on for a couple of blocks and then it was gone.’
A little later: ‘Another time it happened in the supermarket. He was there, but he wasn’t.’
Tom glanced across at the car park again, and saw only parked cars.
He summoned reason to the scene. ‘Wouldn’t Felix have tried to get in touch with Rory if he’d come back?’
A cold breeze had arisen. The dog was straining forward on his leash. Nelly drew a length of knitted wool from her pocket, folded it, placed it about her throat, passed the ends through the loop. It was the first time Tom had noticed this way of tying a scarf, although it was much in evidence that year.
He spent Sunday evening in blessed solitude, putting together his shortlist for the lectureship. At the last minute he added the DPhil, with a question mark against her name. Afterwards he downed two whiskies, fast.
When the doorbell rang he was sure it was Nelly. He went swiftly to the door and opened it to Posner.
‘There you are.’ Posner spoke with a trace of impatience, as if Tom had been slow to answer a summons. ‘Bloody awful weather.’
He thrust a crumpled black wing at Tom and glided past. There was an odour of damp cloth from the umbrella; nothing else. Posner had no smell.
In the living room he said, ‘You’re in the phone book,’ as if it were a breach of taste. Then, without a glance at his surroundings, ‘Quaint little place.’
Tom heard shoddy and cramped.
The flat was heated by electric radiators but Posner crossed to the fireplace and stood with his back to the empty hearth. It conjured country weekends; the sense of well-being that comes from killing small animals. Yet Tom realised that his visitor wasn’t altogether at ease. It was the hint of disdain; assured, Posner had set himself to charm.
The umbrella was a wounded thing dripping between them. Tom said, ‘Whisky?’ and left the room before Posner could reply. When he returned, Posner had shifted to the sofa. He had taken off his leather jacket and sat with one leg cocked, ankle resting on the opposite knee.
In Posner’s hand the tumbler looked child-size, the tilting liquid calculated and mean. His moon gaze drifted about until he aimed it at the ceiling.
Tom was thinking of rooms so casually perfect they might have been assembled for the camera; of paintings lining a hall, of polished wood in which a lamp might be reborn as a star. Other images intervened in these remembered frames. Iris’s kitchen cupboards, covered with yellow-fl owered contact paper, hovered above Posner’s mirrored mantelpiece. The vinyl concertina door that separated her living area from her bedroom now barred the access to his stairs.